The moon landing was faked. The Holocaust never happened. Sept. 11 was an inside job.
Belief in the most outlandish conspiracy theories has long been a fixture of modern life. And as the mass murder of children in America’s schools has also become a grimly familiar event, so has conspiratorial whispering — that the shootings were “false flag” operations orchestrated by anti-gun groups, or even that they never happened at all.
The latest entry on this paranoid list, in the wake of the Parkland school massacre, is the assertion that the student survivors — like 18-year-old Emma González and 17-year-old David Hogg — who have vocally advocated for legislative action, are not students at all, but “crisis actors” who go from shooting to shooting, pretending to be survivors in order to hijack these tragedies for the political cause of gun control.
It’s a transparently absurd belief. If “crisis actors” were a thing, then we would see the same faces at the sites of different horrors. And if they weren’t students, how to explain the ample evidence of their school attendance? But plausibility has nothing to do with the appeal of such theories, and attempting to rebut them using logic or evidence routinely backfires. The mere fact that many of the leaders of the nascent “Never Again” movement are members of the school drama club will undoubtedly be cited as proof that there is “some truth” to the wildest fantasizing.
How can people believe such crazy things? The prevalence of conspiracy theories, including transparently ludicrous ones, belies the common assumption that all who hold to them are clinically paranoid or otherwise incapable of functioning in the modern world. The common psychological explanations for the appeal of conspiracy theories cite two motivations: the need for control and a distrust of authority.
On the surface, conspiracy theories would seem to be profoundly disempowering. If shadowy groups control nearly everything that happens, then any mere individual is surely helpless before them. But on a psychological level, they offer the power of apparent knowledge. Other people may be surprised by events, but you who know the secret are never surprised, nor confused. By virtue of your ability to order events and ascribe definitive meaning to them, you gain a measure of control over them — in your own mind, at least.
By the same token, belief in conspiracy theories thrives when authority is distrusted. If the government and the media are lying to you routinely, then you have to seek out other sources of information to understand what is really going on. And if you are engaged in such a quest, is it so surprising if you gravitate to the sources that the great and good most fervently denounce? Your suspicion of the denouncers transmutes their very criticisms into recommendations.
But there’s something insufficient about these explanation for the kind of conspiracy-mongering we’re seeing right now in the wake of Parkland. Read more......